ABSTRACT
Over 20 years ago, I visited the art gallery of Maya painter Salvador Reanda Quiejú in Santiago Atitlán, Guatemala. Santiago is a Maya city, not a town or a village. Its inhabitants consider themselves city dwellers, not peasants. “We have always been urbanites,” one of the Tz’utujil Maya neighbors of Reanda Quiejú told me. “Chuitinamit [the pre-Hispanic name of the city] was not as big as Tenochtitlán [the Aztec capital] but life was the same.” True or not, most of Santiago’s 45,000 Tz’utujil Maya see themselves as modern, globalized citizens. Some 1,500 miles to the Southeast on the continent, Aymara painter Rosmery Mamani Ventura shares a similar lifestyle. El Alto, bordering Bolivia’s capital La Paz, truly is a huge, globalized city and its 675,000 Aymara speaking inhabitants do indeed lead the life of our contemporary urban times. However, when they express themselves in art, old themes loom up. For example, the major role of the elderly and the ancestors return time and again in their work, as do community activities and cyclical time. Sara Shahriari from the Indian Country Today website asked Rosmery Mamani “What attracts you to portraits?” The painter responded: “With a portrait it is as if that person is gazing at you and saying ‘Look at me. I am telling you this, I feel this,’ and that attracts me to portraiture, because it makes direct contact with the viewer. I love to draw elderly people, children, and women—I’ve also drawn men but not often, mostly older women. […] The women who come to ask for money in the streets are people from my communities, they are my own blood, my own people, and that’s why I want to draw them—because I am myself, and I see myself in them.” (Shahriari, 2013)
